Writing

Here are some definitions of writing that are not found in the dictionary:

Writing is the gathering of our language and our wits into a cause.

Writing is not neutral in its intentions, is not a text or document of letterings, but comes carrying freight, it carries weight and meaning and purpose and effect.

Writing is something we learn at school and some of us go on learning for the rest of our lives.

Writing abounds as our thinking abounds, as our breathing expands and contracts, as our body moves and stays.

Writing employs grounded clunky words to fly through the air like a dancer.

Writing goes into places you wouldn’t read about.

Writing enlivens words every day, affirms words and can make new even the oldest words in our vocabulary.

Writing wants to stop time while being itself a product of time.

Writing involves people who spend half a lifetime writing a book that no one reads and people who spend one day writing something that is read by everyone generation after generation; and vice versa, involves people who spend half a lifetime writing something everyone reads and someone who spent a day writing something that no one will ever read.

Writing makes the mark you hope you will never wish to cross out.

Writing usually knows how to start, almost invariably has to figure out how to continue, and sometimes doesn’t know how to stop.

Writing is the voice by another means.

Writing is a rational way of going beyond the rational.

Writing deals in transparency, objectification, reason, logic and singularity, but with equal facility deals with contradiction, paradox, incompatibility, inexplicableness and plurality, sometimes on the same page.

Writing uses tangible elements to present intangible realities.

Writing is sometimes the only way out, sometimes the only way in.

Writing is created in the light and we wish writing acknowledged this more often than it does.

This is part 4 of my opening night paper, originally called ‘Mapping the Terrain’, given at the Writers Retreat at Santa Casa, Queenscliff, on Thursday the 20^th of June 2013, under the aegis of the Carmelite Centre.